As I watched My So-Called Enemy, a documentary that follows six Israeli and Palestinian teenage girls from a peace-building workshop in New Jersey in 2002 and back to the Middle East several years later, I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable at times. The Palestinian young women refer to their Israeli counterparts exclusively as “Jews;” Hanin, a Palestinian Muslim, tells Gal, an Israeli Jew, that she should go back to Iran where her parents were born; Inas, a Palestinian Christian, tearfully tells the camera her father died of a heart condition when ambulances were prevented from entering their village during a lockdown.

But I also felt a more general sense of awkwardness, that strange frenetic energy invariably emitted whenever teenage girls come together for the first time—though in this case a lot more was at stake in the us vs. them dynamic. But the beauty of this film is not simply that it looks at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a new way, it’s that it shows how the particularly vulnerable demographic of teenage girls attempts to deal with and understand the “enemy”—in this case, other teenage girls.

As I watched My So-Called Enemy, a documentary that follows six Israeli and Palestinian teenage girls from a peace-building workshop in New Jersey in 2002 and back to the Middle East several years later, I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable at times. The Palestinian young women refer to their Israeli counterparts exclusively as “Jews;” Hanin, a Palestinian Muslim, tells Gal, an Israeli Jew, that she should go back to Iran where her parents were born; Inas, a Palestinian Christian, tearfully tells the camera her father died of a heart condition when ambulances were prevented from entering their village during a lockdown.

But I also felt a more general sense of awkwardness, that strange frenetic energy invariably emitted whenever teenage girls come together for the first time—though in this case a lot more was at stake in the us vs. them dynamic. But the beauty of this film is not simply that it looks at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a new way, it’s that it shows how the particularly vulnerable demographic of teenage girls attempts to deal with and understand the “enemy”—in this case, other teenage girls.